Add the word “breaks guitars” after any company, and everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about.
“Breaks guitars” is synonymous with terrible service, bureaucracy and corporate arrogance. And you’d expect an airline to be particularly sensitive to it.
For those of you who missed the whole United Breaks Guitars episode, here’s a recap: Back in 2009, United Airlines destroyed country musician David Carroll’s checked guitar and then basically ignored his damage claim.
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She suspects that the criminals may have skimmed her Visa account information while she was filling up her gas tank in South Florida. Or maybe not. Nowadays, hackers don’t even have to see your credit card to access the information on it. They can scan it from a safe distance.
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It comes to us by way of Kathleen Colduvell and her boyfriend, David Dimm. A few weeks ago, they were flying from Philadelphia to Tampa on US Airways.
“We were only going for the weekend, so we each had one cabin-approved carry on,” says Colduvell.
Alas, halfway through the boarding process, a gate agent announced that the overhead bins were completely full. By the way, there’s a good reason for that: Passengers carry more onboard now in an effort to avoid the $25 fee for the first checked bag. Also, they don’t want the airline to lose their luggage.
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Question: I traveled to Europe on a codeshare flight between Delta Air Lines and KLM. Before I left the United States, I carefully checked the size and weight restrictions for my two bags on both the Delta and KLM websites, because I’m an artist and I needed to take rolls of paper with me. I made sure my bags complied.
The trip from Portland, Ore., to Copenhagen, Denmark went off without a hitch; I paid $50 to check a second bag. However, on the flight from Toulouse, France, to Portland, Ore., I had to pay 200 Euros for the second bag. When the gate agent saw my second bag, she declared it “too long,” she never measured it. Although the flight was on KLM, the airport staff worked for Air France. There was no KLM or Delta presence that I could find in that airport.
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By all accounts, Maddy and Phil Handler liked their October cruise on the Riviera, one of the new mid-size ships in Oceania’s fleet. There was just the matter of the Handler’s luggage — and reams of correspondence between the couple and a vice president at the cruise line, bickering about what happened to it.
The cruise line claims another passenger inadvertently took the Handler’s suitcase and that it tried to help them retrieve it. But these passengers are unhappy with the way in which their claim has been handled, and they want answers about their missing luggage. They want me to step in and get a clear explanation from Oceania.
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Aaron Fox is not the vindictive type. He’s a surfer, which, if you look it up in the dictionary, is synonymous with “laid back.”
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Amtrak is raising its luggage fees on Sept. 10, the national rail carrier disclosed on its website today.
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